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The Open Handset Alliance (OHA), a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies with Google at the forefront, have developed Android to become the first complete, open and free mobile platform.

The system will allow users to access core mobile device functionality through standard API calls and hopes to include such innovative features as combing information from the web with data on the phone, such as contacts or geographic location.

Google’s Android Software Developer (SDK), first released in November, is part of OHA and is based on the Linux 2.6 kernel using an operating system, middleware stack, customizable user interface and applications.

The preview version of the platform was released without real support for the hardware, while instead developers were given a software emulator based on Qemu.

Credited as one of the first developers to use Android in a hardware platform is Ben Leslie from Australia, using the Armadillo-500 from Atmark-Techno based on Freescale’s i.MX31L mobile processor.

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As an alternative for using the FusionCharts Flash-based charts you can now also use the Google Chart API to generate image-based charts. You just construct a URL with the chart data and configuration encoded in the URL variables and you’re done. Jon Winstanley created a wizard to quickly generate these URL, which is a real time-saver. The only limitation is the number of queries, which is limited to 50,000 a day.

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